Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

mined: Long overdue

I could swear that I had looked through mined a year or two ago, and found it worthy. But I got an email yesterday from martintxoz saying it wasn’t anywhere on this site, which would be a dire oversight. And now, looking through the Index I find nothing, and both DuckDuckGo and Google agree: I have been remiss.

mined is a text editor that comes in a variety of flavors and versions, and one of the reasons I should have visited this long before now is that it goes to great lengths to satisfy weirdos like me.

Perhaps the most satisfying being, it has the option for commands and keystrokes that mimic WordStar, so I don’t have to suffer to learn unintuitive keystrokes. (It will also pretend to be pico, or even emacs, although I shudder at the thought.)

And it uses color, has pulldown and popup menus at every turn, syntax highlighting, on-screen cues, mouse support and a man page almost as long as mplayer‘s.😯

If that isn’t enough for you, I can honestly claim that I’m amazed at the length and breadth of options available to you — all the way down to whether a paragraph end is coded with a non-blank line end, or an empty line. That is considerable detail.

Supposedly, mined’s real claim to fame is support for multicode characters or alphabets beyond the stale 26 letters that comprise Western language. If you need access to those glyphs, mined might be something to look into.

Of course, that lack of character support is what causes some of the goofy images you see in the screenshots. I could do everyone a favor and install something a little more visible than just the garble you see here and there, but I’m lazy today.😉

mined is good stuff. It has just about every feature you could imagine, makes no excuses for pulling in the keystrokes and styles of other popular editors, uses colors and a menu approach, and even has features that will appeal to specific groups of users. It’s well arranged, well thought-out and has a clean visual appearance.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “mined: Long overdue”

I was finding a text editor for ssh connections that was capable of open some files and present all of them in a “tab bar”, like the graphical ones… Well, I think that I found it. For the moment, it’s works well. I’m working with it in Debian stable, and installed it from his webpage downloads. Good !!